[9fans] awk oddity?

[9fans] awk oddity?

[Ed Brown]

The following commands:
    awk '{print substr($0,1,8)}' bigfile >crud
        and
    awk '{print length($0,1,8)}' bigfile >crud

Seem to lock up awk on Plan9.   If I launch either one there will be a
flurry of hard disk activity then nothing.  A "ps" will reveal the
process is "ready", but the crud file stops growing at 8647 for the
first and 8192 for the second.   Rebooting doesn't change these numbers.

More perplexing:
if I
    tr 'A-Z' 'X' <bigfile >bigfile.noatoz
        or
    sed 100000q <bigfile >bigfile.100k

Then, use bigfile.noatoz or bigfile.100k the above awk scripts complete
successfully.

As a final check I tried the file on Linux.   There were no problems.

My environment is single box Plan9 using kfs with 96MB of RAM.
bigfile is:
    307312741 bytes.
    731593 lines.
    ascii text file with "\r\n" record separators


Does anybody have and idea what is going on here?

Thanks in advance

Ed Brown

Re: [9fans] awk oddity?

[Ed Brown]

> 
> The following commands:
>     awk '{print substr($0,1,8)}' bigfile >crud
>         and
>     awk '{print length($0,1,8)}' bigfile >crud
> 
> Seem to lock up awk on Plan9. ...
<snip>

User error.  bigfile was from another OS.  I made an 
assumption that it was *7-bit* ascii, and thus UTF. 
A suggestion to other newbies like myself, run  tcs  on your "text"
files first.